What about [0, ∞]? Yeah I know it is not mathematically correct but if the USD is worth nothing at all then the value of BTC is USD is not defined anymore (as a real number) which is somewhat the same as saying it is equal to infinity.

I did not know about that. It seems like the channel factory still needs to be created by all the users and then it can create a channel between any 2 users.

And it seems cheaper mostly if you want to create many channels directly between many of the users.

In the lightning network you need to be able to publish a transaction if the other participant does not behave. So I don't see how someone could give you a channel without you having opened it by doing an on chain transaction. At least that's how I understand it.

To buy the cup of coffee a few satoshis. But you need to have a channel open. This will cost you the transaction fees of a normal transaction. But afterward you can buy as many coffees as you want assuming you put enough money in the channel.

Oh, my sweet summer child, what do you know of fear?
Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet
deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north. Fear is for the long
night, when the sun hides its face for years at a time, and little children
are born and live and die all in darkness while the direwolves grow gaunt and
hungry, and the white walkers move through the woods

Oh course it does not. You have a passion that does align with society's needs but it may not be the case for most people. How many people are passionate about music compared to the number of people who will be able to win money by playing music? Do you think in the middle ages most people were passionate about being farmers, yet 90% of the population had no choice but to do it for a living. Of course we are not in the middle ages, but it does not mean that people's passions and society needs are magically aligned. Most people cannot win money by practicing their passion.

I agree. I'm more convinced that we are in a bubble than when the price was at $3000. But it's hard to tell for certain. Using the past price as an indicator for what will happen is not certain. It is a risky exercise when you use it to tell yourself we are not in bubble territory yet and it is a risky exercise to use it to convince yourself that we are in bubble territory now. I'm 80% sure that we are in bubble territory now but I wish I could be more certain.

But seriously was it in a bubble at $50? Sure the price was $10 a few months before. But when the bubble popped the price did not go back to $50. So were we already in a bubble at $50?

I'm not sure bubble is the right word for it...

Assuming bitcoin does not go below $3000 for the next 5 years, were we in a bubble at $3000 in august? At the time it sure looked like a bubble to me, it was worth $1000 just a few months earlier, now I feel that $3000 is probably above the price we will get back to when the bubble pop.

It makes no sense for them to be buying BTC with tether. Someone has to buy tether. How can they maintain tether to be worth close to 1$ if they emit more and more tether to buy BTC, tether should crash and it does not. If the number of tether increase it means that more and more people are selling their BTC for tether instead selling for USD in other exchanges. It does seem a little strange, but it may be a fiscally adventageous strategy in countries where exchanging a coin for another is not a taxable event. And it certainly does not explain why the price of BTC increases when more tether are emitted, it should be the opposite, more tether should be emitted when more people want to sell their BTC for tether... It makes no sense :(

But quite often the codecs are separated from the player itself. So that the player is not contaminated by the infringed patents of the codecs. But VLC does not rely on external codecs and this is what made VLC a player that just works.

You are probably right. But there is a kickback coming, the price of bitcoin will incite people to get into mining, and difficulty will increase more and more so the profits of mining will align more and more with the costs. And what appeared to be a sustainable price according to coin supply and demand will turn out completely unsustainable and the price will crash hard.

And that's even without talking about FOMO and people not investing constantly into bitcoin. Given those 2 dynamics it almost seem inevitable that bitcoin will crash hard at some point and possibly go back to a multi years bear market.

The only hope for this not happening is that enough whales understand all of this much better than I do. That they know very well where the point of non sustainability is and that they will slow down growth above that point. But it seems very unlikely, it's probably much easier (and profitable) for them to do a massive pump and dump and contribute to the crash instead of attenuating it.

Of course this does not change the fact that the price at the end of the crash will be much higher than the price at the beginning of the bubble, and that the bear market that will follow will probably end at some point.

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Jesus of Nazareth? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jews would tell you. It’s a Christian legend. Jesus was the son of God, so powerful and so wise he could use his preaching to influence the course of history... He had such a knowledge of the human soul that he could even touch the heart of any man he met. The Holy Spirit is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. He became so powerful... the only thing he was afraid of was losing the ability to touch himself, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught one of his disciple everything he knew, then his disciple had him crucified. Ironic. He could touch the heart of any man, but in the end he could not even touch himself.

Businesses will only want to open unidirectional channels with users, because opening bidirectional ones will force them to lock bitcoins into them which is not what a company will usually want to do, it will want to invest its money in its core business. So it will mean that users connected to those businesses will be able to pay businesses perfectly fine but will not be able to pay other users using the LN, because they will only have channels with outgoing coins. So a central node that is willing to open bi-directionnal channels will be really valuable for users.

So the conclusion is that we need another hard fork to fix it? I'm saying it half jokingly but I think it's true. We should not be so scared of hard forks that we stop improving Bitcoin when it needs it.